Masters of the Universe (1987)

Dolph Lundgren does a great job as He-man - sometimes you'd think he really was a plastic Mattel action figure - and the characters and story perfectly recall the Saturday morning cartoon I grew up watching as a bleary child just out of bed and not yet capable of complex thought (He-man teams up with Earthling teenagers to recover a key that has allowed Skeletor to overtake Castle Greyskull) but despite all these positives, MotU is a famous turkey - a critical and commercial failure upon its release in 1987.

★☆☆☆☆

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Captain Fantastic (2016)

A man and his too-many-to-get-to-know children whose super intellects have developed unhindered by rotisserie chickens and X-box, emerge from their lives off-the-grid to attend their mother's funeral, but their encounters with fat and poorly educated people raise questions about the father's unorthodox child-rearing techniques, in this feel-good movie so desperate to sing that in the end the kids actually do.

★★★☆☆

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All Good Things (2010)

I was not familiar with the actual Robert Durst or his bizarre true story of double (triple?) murder, and having watched this perfectly suspenseful thriller starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, I am none the wiser - it is acted beautifully, the details of the case are laid out suspensefully, but it feels like a mere highlight reel from an unsolved case, one that frustrates by being neither outright fact nor outright fiction.

★★★☆☆

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Superman Returns (2006)

This reboot of the Superman franchise tries too hard to make Superman relevant to modern audiences and achieves the opposite, with modern audiences having to agree with the views Lois Lane expresses in her Pulitzer Prize-winning article, "Why the world doesn't need Superman" -- she is right, he barely survives a real estate controversy and the world clearly doesn't need him.

★★☆☆☆

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